The Temple Tree of Landbohøjskolens Have

This ginkgo is male, and the female it pollinates lives on the other side of the street. The two trees have never touched. The university library, writing up the garden's own history, calls it the largest ginkgo in the collection and gives 1883 as its planting year, which would make it about 143. That date comes from that one source and nowhere else, so read it as the garden's account rather than a measured fact. It is planted in the middle of a large stone mound, which is a strange thing to do to a tree and suits this one. Ginkgo biloba is the last surviving member of a lineage older than flowering plants, and the Danish name for it, tempeltræet, points at the temple courtyards in China and Japan where the final populations were kept alive by monks while the wild ones disappeared. The garden around it was laid out in 1858 for the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College and has been legally protected since 1965. Protection is not immortality. The blood beech planted the year the garden opened, which the official heritage listing still describes as the thickest tree here, was felled in 2018. Nothing suggests the ginkgo has gone the same way and the species is famously hard to kill, but the newest dated confirmation we could find of this one is not recent. The garden is free and open from sunrise to sunset.